Weekly Dev Meeting

September 18, 2024

Key Achievements:

  • Transport Layer Improvements: The network joining through a gateway works fine with most errors resolved. Nodes are acquiring connections, and the retry mechanism ensures successful connections even when initial attempts fail.
  • Unit Test Success: Most transport layer unit tests are passing, with the system able to establish connections after retries. Random packet drop simulations highlight some intermittent failures, but overall functionality is stable.
  • Connection Debugging: Logs show nodes progressively acquiring connections over time. The team is working on cleaning up the test environment for better debugging.
  • State Synchronization: Currently, when peers update their state, the entire state is sent rather than just deltas. This approach is suboptimal, and the plan is to shift to delta updates after the initial release.

Remaining Tasks:

  1. Finalizing the Gateway and Transport Logic:

    • Confirm that all hops forward connections properly across the maximum number of peers.
    • Ensure that simulations consistently reach max connections and that no nodes get stuck due to filtered peers.
    • Clean up and merge the remaining pull requests related to transport and connection handling.

  2. UI and Simulation Enhancements:

    • Refine the UI to allow easier debugging and visual tracking of operations like put and get.
    • Perform further tests with simulated events to validate the system’s behavior under real network conditions.

  3. Real-Network Testing:

    • Conduct real-world tests by deploying the network on Ian’s machine to confirm if nodes can join and function correctly.
    • Address any issues that arise during real-network testing.

  4. Delta Updates:

    • Implement a state synchronization protocol where only deltas are sent between peers, reducing bandwidth and improving efficiency. This will be done shortly after the initial release.

Conclusion:

The project is nearing completion, with only a few remaining tasks related to connection handling, UI enhancements, and state synchronization. The team plans to release the new version soon and follow up with subsequent updates to fix any emerging issues.